Abstract
A combined and thorough medical and engineering study of road traffic accidents in Iraq is presented in this paper. The medical investigation covered about 1500 road traffic accident patients transported by ambulance to various hospitals in Baghdad. In most cases, the medical survey team covered the diagnosis of the injury as soon as it was confirmed and death at the moment of arrival of the patient to the emergency department of the hospital. Multi-organ injury was predominating and the required injuries were performed successfully for single organ injury but the chance of successful operation decreased as the number of injured organs increased. To arrive at the major cause of death and/ or heavy injured road traffic accident patients, analysis of speed of vehicles on rural highways in Iraq was made. The traffic engineering study revealed that high speed of vehicles, exceeding the design speed of the highway with abnormality of spot speed distribution, was the major reason of such severe accidents. Death rate from road traffic accident in Iraq is 44.7 which makes Iraq the fourth country in the rate of road traffic accidents. Road traffic accidents are leading cause of both internal and external injuries and major cause of death. This paper reveals that liver, spleen and neck were the most reported organ injuries in road traffic accidents in Iraq. Pre hospital care, time between the crash and the admission to a trauma center and the availability of trauma center can affect significantly the outcome of the crash. Similarly, the use of seat belt, front and sideway airbags can decrease the rate of organs injuries due to road traffic accidents. A comparison of results of this study with those in other studies in different countries is presented and both agreements and disagreements are discussed.
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